Northern Pacific was the first transcontinental railroad to have dining cars. But Northern Pacific was the last transcontinental railroad to streamline its premiere train, the last to offer a full diner on that streamlined train, and the last to speed up that train to match its competition.
NP’s dining car menus reflect this declining interest in serving passengers. Its menus achieved their peak in quality in the late 1930s, but in much of the 1950s it used rather plain menu cards rather than folders. Even when it began using folders, most of them used black-and-white photos that did little to highlight the beauty of the Northwest or of the Raymond Loewy color scheme applied to NP passenger trains.
Perhaps I am just biased as the Great Northern was always my favorite railroad and as a result I never put much emphasis on collecting NP menus. Many of the menus in the series below are marked “missing,” which usually means I’ve seen them somewhere on the web but don’t have them in my collection. I suspect I am missing not only menus but some series of menus that NP issued in the 1930s. But I’m pretty sure I have the only menu series it issued in the 1950s and 1960.
If you know of any menus or entire menu series that aren’t included below, please let me know. If you have such a menu or menus and a scanner, please send me scans. Thanks.
Real Photo Cards
Northern Pacific’s first notable series consisted of 7″x11″ cards with black-and-white photos on one side and the menu on the other. The photos are not particularly inspiring, which is only partly because they have faded. Since the dinner menus are identical on many of them, I suspect these were used to advertise the dining car rather than used as dining car menus themselves.
The menus are undated but a couple of them have the name of an NP official that places them from 1921 or later; I’m conservatively listing them here as 1925. Several of these scans were contributed by Streamliner Memories readers. Menus listed as “missing” are ones for which I have only the front cover.
 1925 Menu |  1925 Menu |  1925 Menu |
 1925 Menu |  1925 Menu |  1925 Menu |
 1925 Menu |  1922 Menu |  1925 Menu |
 1922 Menu |  1925 menu |  1925 menu |
 Missing |  Missing |  Missing |
 Missing |  Missing |  Missing |
Tinted Photo Cards
NP tinted some of its photo card menus, usually with just blue and yellow. These are a great improvement but the photos are still somewhat muddy. The rosy cheek tinting of the Indian baby is completely unrealistic, but that’s probably what NP patrons wanted to see: happy Native Americans.
Note that one of the photos in the Black & White series is also in the Tinted series. The prices are identical on both menus, so that doesn’t help date them. However, it is reasonable to think that the Black-and-White menus came first, followed by the Tinted menus.
 1925 Menu |  1925 Menu |  1925 Menu |
 Missing |  Missing |
Black & Cream Photos
In 1935, NP had several menus with black-and-white photos printed in cream-colored paper. I’ve found menus in this series for both lunch and dinner.
 Missing |  Missing |  Missing |
 Missing |
Rustic Photo Menus
The high point of NP menus was in the late 1930s through the early 1940s when it issued at least one series of menus printed on high-grade, stiff paper with natural or rustic colors. Black-and-white or sepia-toned photos were glued onto these menus, giving them the same three-dimensional quality found on Rio Grande’s glued-on photo menu series.
 1935 Menu |  1937 Menu |  1940 Menu |
 1940 Menu |  1940 Menu |  1942 Menu |
 Missing |  Missing |  Missing |
 Missing |  Missing |  Missing |
Ron Nixon Series
NP menus I’ve found from the 1950s are cards with minimal decoration. In the early 1960s, NP issued a few menus with color covers, including one featuring the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and one showing the 1883 Last Spike ceremony, but each was formatted completely differently so don’t count as a series.
In the late 1960s, NP issued a few menus with full-page black-and-white photos by Ron Nixon, an NP dispatcher who was also a very active railroad photographer. I don’t know whether NP paid him to take photos but I suspect it just paid him for any of his photos that it used. Nixon shot in black-and-white, probably because color film was expensive, and NP was happy to print black-and-white menu covers for the same reason.
 1966 Menu |  1966 Menu |  1969 Menu |